The Value of Human Life
My Aunt is a very devout, hardline American (and consequently, quite Protestant-ized) Catholic. You know the type. Taught her children to leave room for Jesus, and protested books on her kids school's curriculum, goes to Pro-Life marches, wears a veil in Church, and has her priest over for dinner. I would call her a zealot, and I am bewildered and fascinated and horrified by much of her belief system. Yet, I was raised with similar beliefs, and I understand to an extent. I also recognize the fact that she is an intelligent woman, a lawyer, who reads extensively and really digs into her own faith. I cannot discount her opinions as so much superstition or so much dogma - although they are superstitious and dogmatic - because I respect her. Like I respect my parents, and many other people I know who are deeply religious and not wholly ignorant. You MUST respect people you know to be fundamentally good, who possess enough education to know better, and yet who hold opinions you disagree with. To only respect those who agree with you is the quickest path to deepest ignorance and loneliness.
This is just to give a bit of context to an event which occurred yesterday. My Aunt sent me a box for Easter. She often does such things - random acts of kindness or thoughtfulness. She is the only person I know who does. In the box was a large Lindt Dark Chocolate Bunny (delicious), and some Reese's pieces, some other candies, a card with a note, and a CD. The CD was self-righteously and provocatively entitled 'Was Hitler Right? (Or: Why Atheists Have No Rights).' This is a typical package. Auntie sweetens her 'food for thought' with treats to encourage engagement with the (usually repugnant looking) material (Catholics are incredible connoisseurs of guilt). The card wished me a Happy Easter and asked for my thoughts on the included CD. Usually I am not tempted by these offerings, but I'd had a frustrating week, and was spoiling for a fight.
The second-to-latest-greatest Mac book does not possess a CD drive, and consequently I found I had no way to listen to the CD. However, I found the transcript here. The author/speaker opens with a short anecdote in which he asks 'liberals' whether or not the Holocaust was terrible, to which they respond 'of course', which he follows up with a 'why?', to which they reply 'because it was.' His point is that the value of human life is derived from God's love for us...and thus, if you do not believe in God or his love for us, human life has no value. Hence the 'atheists have no rights.' His argument is not particularly well made, and it engages in the kind of belittling lack of clear philosophical grounding that I detest. I decided to reply to her in an email. My response was as follows.
Human life is not inherently valuable. Certainly not more so than the lives of the animals or of the rest of nature. This is because value is always relative. To have value, you must have value to someone. The author of the CD understood that. To have a universal value to human life, you have to have a greater, conscious being, above all humanity, to whom human life is valuable. Of course, the only such being in our cultural reference would be God. Thus, in this sense, he was correct, to have general 'value of human life,' you need God...or something like God. But he totally missed the other option, which is that human life can have value, not universally, but specifically. Human life has value to other humans.
Human beings are inherently clannish. We form groups and sub-groups by nature. If not according to belief or interest, then based on the most insignificant differences, even arbitrarily. We also have multiple, overlapping group affiliations in varying levels of importance. For example, I can affiliate myself with my family, my university friends, my university alumni, a political group, a nation, a hobby group, or my work colleagues. The group of all other humans, generally, is an affiliation with the furthest level of importance.
Human beings are naturally suspicious of, or violent towards, other groups. Likewise, the value of human life is directly related to their participation in the same group, or groups...and the closer the affiliation, the higher the value of the life. This is why we can barely blink an eye when 200 people die in a country across the world, but the death of a high school classmate can hit hard...and the death of a relative hits even harder. But then again, the death of a close friend may seem harder to bear than the death of your own blood, if you didn't know them at all. The value of a human life is relative to the number of groups they were a part of, and how much importance that group affiliation had to everyone else in the group.
Of course, human beings can also be unrealistically idealistic...and especially when religion makes you feel like other people's lives SHOULD matter to you. This is why we have created groups like the UN, to create an affiliation that operates with enough breadth to try and cover all the groups that other people don't care about...to try to impart a stronger affiliation to 'humanity.' This is also why the UN is so weak...because this affiliation will inherently be overruled by more immediate group loyalties.
This may seem like a bleak perspective, but at the same time, I think it lights the way to finding a more real and relevant universal value to human life. It just requires us to actually communicate with, and form connections with, everyone. :D
